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Saturday, December 31, 2016

Sky taupe with snowlight and moonlight and cloudcrawling in the window and my son sleeping sprawled across my legsgoing nowhere with Peter Pan who as I understand it as an adult is a great menaceOutside zero bombs flay our neighborhood to its quaking skeletonThe only injury in this room is a cut on my pinky under a bandageEverything is terribleEverything is beautiful

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Here is how I become the beginning of my son’s storyHe gets heavier and every day my body is a little lessmy own My belly twitches rabbit-like and I think ofthe 3D ultrasound where the nurse pointed out his openeyelids Whatever he sees in that darkness I hope it comfortshim Because we are shaped into humans alone in a friendly room the self gathers strength One dayhe will tell a person that he loves all about his parentsOh, you would think that coffee and tea were sacredfor how much they dote over it He laughs at us and how we are What I do now is food chain fodderfor the future This boy will teach me how to loosenmy leash to the self I have always walked in

Thursday, September 15, 2016

The dream of every American homeownerTo see across your home in one unbroken expanse Shore to horizon The home as ocean As perfect contained realm without fractureor interruption Here is you cooking even if you never cook Here is you washing greens And there are your children playing on the floor with a single red toy A wooden truckNothing is scattered around them No envelopeson the countertops to tie your bodies to an addressThis home is holy Between all of you lustrous floors gray walls quartz countertop subway tile backsplash without one fleck of moldYour kitchen is a train station Is a train to carry youtoward what you see Toward what you almost seeIf you just make this place gleam a touch moremaybe you can be the first humans allowed to not die

Monday, August 22, 2016

My name is Nicholas, I live in a hollow tree, the words rose up from some unseen mother’s mouth among the red shelves. Her friend the poet says, can I just gift you with this anecdote. It was like some grand narrator.

Monday, August 15, 2016

Warm gray sky veined with branches out the window on the first day of May as I nurse my son to sleep and I recall a warm storm one evening when I was seven. Porch swing, white eyelet dress, glittery plastic pony in my hand, my best friend next door in her living room watching the Miss Teen America pageant. What I felt as I leaned into the wind: the future is coming, the future is coming, and there is so much I don’t yet know about everything, my best friend, who we would be, how the invisible maelstrom of love and pain and decisions crouched before us all like the horizon, its breath warm on our cheeks.

What is the day.

What is one evening. What is one evening when I was seven, and one when I am thirty-three, and the dangling chain draped between them, a collar brooch. What is the throat beneath this collar.

My son does so many things well, even though he has only been in our world for five months. He eats, he grows, he crows and croons his language up into the sky of our bedroom for us to wake to. He lets a sharp tooth within his mouth pierce his gums, he smiles and uses his eyes to say he loves us, he wants to sit up while holding our hands, he has started to roll over. He naps erratically but sleeps well at night. We nurse as the light leaves the room, and when it’s dark, he’s full and asleep. I let him fall deeper into his sleep, into his dreams. I transfer him to his crib, slowly, matching our breaths, matching my movements to our breaths, lifting, standing, approaching the crib and placing him inside, trying each night for the softest descent. Shh shh shh, three times, times nine or ten or fifty, shh shh shh. Let the day fall away from you, sweet baby. Tomorrow there is more.

Our day gets spent. Sometimes it clinks by in pennies, three books read sprawled on an elephant blanket, a granola bar eaten in six minutes, moments laughing back and forth at the joke of how I touch his nose and say boop, a song about a monkey, a diaper, a diaper, a diaper. At some point in the day, I lose a stack of bills, it becomes 4:00 in the afternoon, or I am suddenly washing my face before bed.

Never before him have I been able to wake early without an alarm clock. Now I wake to his noises. I do not go out to work. I do not need to rush to get ready. I change him, I feed him, I let him doze. Maybe I doze while holding him. My husband gets up and we talk to our son. I’ll shower and come downstairs and we will start our day. I will move based on his needs. Son, you are my clock.

Thursday, July 7, 2016

to her, and now, with the baby, they tell her about their babies, now retired, who have babies who have babies. Eighty-eight years old, my husband gone, one of my sons gone, just one son left and all his babies here, family means everything. Remember to take pictures.

Wednesday, June 8, 2016

to make life easy for her son, she would, but because life won’t fit into the small, be- smiley faced blender, she plops into it chunks of cooked sweet potato, banana, avocado. From now on he will eat what grows in the earth rendered thin, fluid, creamy.

Monday, May 30, 2016

probably What is wobbly will become strong someday but only if it wobbles enough

I consider several counterexamples Threadbare fences hanging on by one measly nailThe skinny tree tethered on each side to a wooden posta family tree come to lifeWorse of all the limb shaken from within by illnessnot evil (the illness) but cruel and thoroughly despicable

What is wobbly can be steadySee There is my baby son lifting his own headRaising his own body to sit Learning how to hold himself

Monday, May 23, 2016

both empty and full. Everything comes to them in a box—high chair, diapers, wipes, car seat base, bottle warmer—and is then unboxed. She slices them at the seam, folds them flat, body into shadow, or places them inside each other, nesting dolls.

Tuesday, May 17, 2016

purple shutters. A beige house gone blue over the weekend. A grandfather in black and white checked pajama pants, carrying his grandson out to collect the mail. They are also in the At Home During the Day Club.

Monday, May 16, 2016

there should be one red thing. Freshly shorn lawn with its red mower. Red convertible parked under limbs greening up. Cardinal darting in the leaves of the oak, reminding you that here is your heart alive inside you for so short a time.

Monday, April 25, 2016

as she does them, calling herself Mommy before her son. This becomes her new habit, casting out a net of language into the future to protect her baby, to encourage the world’s softness and obedience. This is the part of hide and seek where the seeker calls out to the hider, Ready or not, here we come.

Wednesday, April 13, 2016

how did we make that leap
to borrow a moon and make it our own
the heart is exhausted.
and the other-telling is now fire-backed and brim
don’t know where else we can go.

the not-earth is a tender song
(and who will read this anyway)

You, in your station, what notes are you trying to sound?
Me. My wolf. We hear you.

There is no substitute. There won’t be anyone to save us.

Sense has ceased.

But, I tell you, we are full of wonder,
literally full of wonder: wonderful.
And there is wonder inside each of us darkly-pitted things.

I’m trying to get you to look at this life. At this page. This screen.
This is not a proxy war

It has been so long since a war has been just men fighting.
To live here, in this moment.

Let the training begin:

First, fight.
Second, love.
Third, love harder

We can season this togetherthings in the wild need salt
Come, let me salt the wounds at your heels

WHAT WILL I DO WITH ALL THESE WOLVES?
Leah Umansky

I am wonder-led by wolves.
This night-world is our lyric, our pack-song.
We comb these paths for beauty, but I cannot chart the countless devouring of tooth and nail

My wolves are wanderers. I, their huntress.

one stores costumes
one thinks he predominates
one lives a life of wind and waves
one thinks darkness is key
one thinks all is retro
one never leaves me
one tangles light and shadow
one folds fable into dreams
one bites anything that moves
one bites anything indulgent
one suggests ferociousness
one imagines dreaming
one absorbs the hurt of the past
one stories for me
one is mine (all mine)
one thinks he knows a way to better days
one keeps remnants in a hole in a cave

together, we rise our way through darkened rambles and haunted freeze-frames
together, we torch what nips at our ankles, pulls at our hair and sneers through barricades
together, we anchor each day into a new day, a new existence, a new tomorrow

Tuesday, March 22, 2016

in our neighborhood: Palmleaf, Littleleaf, and our street, Starleaf. If the streets are branches, the houses are leaves. If the streets are leaves, the houses are its veins, its across-the-palm creases.

Tuesday, February 23, 2016

When you wake up how are you changed little boy What ropes and pulleys are now joinedin your mind and swaying For each new abilitya new rung on your inner monkey bars Your voicewhich comes spilling out of your smile Your smallsmile And later your grin The anemones that your handsbecome fingers curling in and blooming out How mustit feel when suddenly movement or sensations are newlyavailable to you An unfamiliar room you find yourself inthat you yourself are building This is why childrenlove blocks Love tinker toys Love joining two hard bitsthat seem unchanging to make a changed third thingBaby if you will build I will bake you the warm bricks and hand them to you like cupcakes Bang the world’s piecestogether sweetie Slam your eyelashes up and down Let your drawbridge mouth release horns and horses and also mandolin-strumming pacifists who will never hold a sword

Friday, February 12, 2016

Poems by Joy Sullivan, art by Kristin Calhoun. An absolutely beautiful project! These pieces and more will be on display at EASE Gallery in Columbus, Ohio, as part of the exhibit "The Game Show," centering on collaborative works.

ALB

Tongues lap at open airas we, sad animals of salt, move towards the altarsloughing strands of hair, sweat, skin, the residue of bodies.

The chalice awakes, its open mouthas whole and dark as your mouth, a black-eyed susan toppled from the sun. I turn and taste the drought.

PUSHING THE BELLY

When you meet the Beluga of your grief in the open ocean, do not pierce or pet it.Do not ride or tame it.Do not feed it anything other than yourself.Instead, let it roll you in its mouth,mold you with its gargantuan tongue.

Let it swallow you whole.Arrive like Jonah in the soft underbelly of lament,in the whale of your own sorrow, drown. Settle among the tattered fish, the carnage,the fishermen's hooks carved into bones of rust.Push your hands into the raucous heart,feel it beat wildly against your palms. Begin to crawl.

Up the colossal throat and past monoliths of teeth,climb out like a hymn. Rise like a stupid miracleflung upon some sun-fragrant rock,shocked and land-hungry, wet with whale spit and resolve.Cup your hands to your heart---full now with the sonar of sadnessRemember how it propelled you, breathless, towards the shore.

BAPTISTRY

In autumn, I eavesdrop on winter. I ruddy my cheeks up and go out.

You were my little shark, cool beside my body, sluicing for blood.

Yet I remain unbroken, innocent as a goat,clenched white in the lemon trees, sleeved in snow— these are the shining days.

***

ABOUT THE ARTISTSJoy Sullivan is a poet and educator living in Franklinton, Ohio. Currently, she
teaches Creative Writing at Columbus State Community College, Columbus
Academy and Thurber House. Joy earned an MA in Poetry from Miami
University and her academic work reflects an interest in social justice,
community development, and creative education. Her most recent
publications include Periodisa Publishing, Boxcar Poetry, and Mirror
Dance. Additionally, she currently serves as the Artist-in-Residence for
the Wexner Center's Pages Program. Kristin Calhoun is an artist and illustrator living in Columbus, Ohio.

Here's a little exchange we had about her work (my question is bolded, and then you'll see Wendy's response). Be sure to keep reading after our mini Q and A--you'll find a poem from the book, and Wendy's bio below.

Q: The poems in your chapbook, The Dancer’s Notes, seem to be studies of movement and stillness (often within the same poem). How do you relate to these concepts as you write? Do you feel active/physical while writing? Or still?

A: Movement and stillness: the teeter-totter where I have spent my life trying to find balance. I was a bookworm growing up, but always took long walks, and played for hours and days in the woods with my brothers and other neighborhood kids. As a philosophy student in college, I took dance classes to get away from the desk and the library. After graduation, I debated grad school in English versus more dancing, and then followed love to Europe, where I had to learn to live in a new language: dance became my means of expression, while my love of language was stirred every day as I became more nimble in French.

Poetry is another way of seeking balance on this seesaw. Although in love with words — or maybe because I am in love with words — I am fascinated by and drawn to silence. My first “adult” poems bloomed in the silence of Quaker Meeting, after I had returned (with my love, and a toddler son) to America, and my mother tongue. Silence is where I find the words, and it is the setting for all the words. I think that this is why I like to have a lot of white space in my poems: the silence that surrounds the words is always present.

In much the same way, dance is born of stillness: each gesture arises from stillness, and there are no movements that are not the intended gesture. This is the goal, at least, just as the poet’s goal is to have not a single extraneous mark on the page.

I sit (or lounge) to write, in any number of places, at home and elsewhere, but I do take frequent breaks for fresh air and moving. I once lived by a long bike path, and would take lines I was working on to that path, and murmur them to the rhythm of my walking. I know writers who listen to music while they work. I can’t do this: if there’s music on, I have to get up and dance. But then dance circles back to the poems and the poetry practice. In The Dancer’s Notes, I try to find words for this dance of the spirit — sometimes they come from stillness, sometimes from movement. It is a dance that never ends.
***

a poem from The Dancer's Notes

Big jump up

A fence, or stileA river rock sunkenin the grass —

Leaping, once, as a childshe crashedinto the top rail —

pain, brightfirewheels splashingin her skull, the vast black sky and her mother

chiding — shewho hesitates islost — Now

she leaps and clearsthe other kneelingin light, and her hearttoo lifts —a big jump up —

her face spangledwith gold

***

About Wendy McVicker

Wendy McVicker is a Teaching Artist and Literature Field Consultant with the Ohio Arts Council’s Arts Learning program. She has always tried to balance writing and moving, contemplation and action. At Webster University, she studied both philosophy and dance, and her life in poetry is paralleled by her life in karate. She lived in French-speaking Switzerland for seven years, and her response to returning to her native tongue was to dive into poetry. Her poems have appeared in small journals online and in print, and in the anthology A Ritual to Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford (ed. Becca J.R. Lachman). In addition to offering poetry workshops and residencies in schools, galleries, libraries, community centers, prisons, and hospitals, McVicker performs with instrumentalist Emily Prince under the name another language altogether, often with dancers and other musicians. The Dancer’s Notes (Finishing Line Press, 2015) is her first chapbook.